The ASUS S14NA-U12 is a motherboard that we noticed at SC23, and we knew that we wanted to overview the platform. It takes a single AMD EPYC 8004 “Siena” processor and exposes the platform’s PCIe Gen5 lanes, reminiscence, and extra whereas including its personal aptitude with 25GbE onboard. It is a enjoyable motherboard, so allow us to get to it.
ASUS S14NA-U12 Overview
The motherboard itself is a CEB 12″ x 10.5″ measurement, making it about 0.9″ wider than a normal ATX motherboard. That’s vital as a result of that additional 0.9″ might imply that some chassis designed for a strict ATX motherboard measurement won’t match. We’ve a extremely cool set of builds had been are doing with EPYC 8004 motherboards, and one space we needed to look into was the chassis we may use simply given the scale of this board.
The large function is the AMD socket SP6 (LGA 4844). If this seems to be acquainted, it is a related measurement to the AMD EPYC 7001-7003 generations and the AMD Threadripper strains thus far. Whereas the socket is a well-known measurement, which makes cooling simpler, it’s not an electrically appropriate socket with the earlier generations.
AMD despatched us various CPUs to make use of. We’re utilizing the AMD EPYC 8324P 32-core processor on this system, however that is only one of 4 ranging as much as the 64 core mannequin and even the prolonged temperature fashions on this motherboard.
One of many massive options of the AMD EPYC 8004 sequence is the DDR5 reminiscence structure. The processor household helps 6-channel reminiscence, half of the EPYC 9004 sequence. It does, nonetheless, assist 2 DIMMs per channel and so ASUS is offering that performance right here. In case you are coming from a 1st or 2nd technology Intel Xeon Scalable, you should utilize the identical variety of reminiscence channels. The large distinction is that with DDR5 reminiscence, it’s a lot sooner at DDR5-4800 speeds.
From an airflow perspective, this platform is optimized for entrance to rear airflow.
One of many actually attention-grabbing options that ASUS has is an array of MCIO connectors. All 5 of those connectors present PCIe Gen5 x8 so one will get cabled lanes equal to a Xeon E5 technology CPU, however simply 4x as quick (PCIe Gen3 versus PCIe Gen5.) When you have SSDs, for instance, you possibly can simply use 10x 2.5″ PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs just like the Kioxia CM7 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD we reviewed through the use of these 5 headers.
The truth that they’re cabled within the entrance of the motherboard implies that they’re normally nearer to the place the drives are put in, usually not requiring as many retimers, decreasing system prices.
Under the CPU socket and the MCIO headers, there are two M.2 slots that are PCIe Gen5 x4 every in addition to the ASUS POST code LCD.
One enjoyable a part of the slots is that one can go as much as M.2 2280 (80mm) however the different can go as much as M.2 22110 (110mm) if you happen to wished to put in two completely different SSD sizes in a system. Our guess is that people will set up one SSD in these or set up two M.2 2280’s.
The PCIe slots are most likely a bit completely different than one would possibly count on. There are two PCIe Gen5 x16 slots. The third slot (PCIE4) is a PCIe Gen5 x8 slot.
Below these is an ASPEED AST2600 BMC and associated parts for out-of-band administration.
The rear I/O has the out-of-band administration port, in addition to VGA and two USB 3 ports for native entry. The large function is the Broadcom BCM57414 that’s built-into the motherboard. There aren’t any 1GbE and even 10GbE ports right here, solely two SFP28 25GbE ports.
Subsequent, allow us to get to the block diagram.
